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Appleman · Jan 22, 2005, 07:03 AM

Just bought a new Dual 2 GHz powerMac G5. Great machine!

It came with a 160 BG Maxtor 6Y160M0 harddisk. Good for the time being.
I wonder what harddisk have you been putting in in order to have more storage and an even faster response.
Are you using the Raid option in Disk Utility in combination with two harddisks?

Thanks.

Mithras · Jan 22, 2005, 11:27 AM

Well, the fastest SATA drive around is the Western Digital Raptor, but you definitely pay in $$/GB for the privilege.

Another option, which would be even faster, is to buy an identically-sized drive (another Maxtor would do fine), and do a RAID-0 stripe. However, this doubles your chances of disk failure, so I wouldn't do this unless you back up to a third drive VERY regularly.

awcopus · Jan 22, 2005, 11:33 AM

First of all, never RAID your boot disc.

Secondly, the premium SATA drive according to storagereview.com is Maxtor's 300GB/16MB buffer monster, which has the ideal combination of speed and silence and affordability. You can get a great deal on this drive at newegg.com.

Barefeats tested this drive against the 10,000RPM sub-100GB Raptor and concluded that the Maxtor simply is better as a boot disk.

I had been happy with the Hitachi 400GB drive that I have installed internally and use vigorously as a scratch , but it has started to make a kind of buzzing noise. Still using it because it still checks out via software, but I have no doubt that it's going to fail soon.

Backing up your data is absolutely key.

*

If your storage needs grow, you can put together an excellent external SATA system using Sonnet's 4+4 SATA card and an external SATA enclosure from MacGurus.com. I've got 4 of the Maxtor 300GB drives in just such an enclosure and its excellent for video editing. Firewire (neither 400 nor 800) simply can't touch this setup for speed.

chris v · Jan 22, 2005, 02:15 PM

Originally posted by awcopus:
First of all, never RAID your boot disc.

Do you simply say this because if one drive in a RAID 0 array fails you won't be able to boot, or are there other reasons?

goMac · Jan 22, 2005, 02:47 PM

Originally posted by chris v:
Do you simply say this because if one drive in a RAID 0 array fails you won't be able to boot, or are there other reasons?

You can't boot from OS X software RAID iirc.

Big Mac · Jan 22, 2005, 05:22 PM

Originally posted by chris v:
Do you simply say this because if one drive in a RAID 0 array fails you won't be able to boot, or are there other reasons?

Here's a nice page on RAID technology:
http://english.aopen.com.tw/tech/techinside/RAID.htm

RAID 0 writes half to one drive and half to the other, so that if there's a failure with one drive both drives are rendered worthless.

Thinine · Jan 22, 2005, 06:43 PM

You can boot from the software RAID in OS X.

awcopus · Jan 22, 2005, 06:49 PM

Originally posted by chris v:
Do you simply say this because if one drive in a RAID 0 array fails you won't be able to boot, or are there other reasons?

I said this because it's simply not worth your while to RAID your boot disc in terms of risk and reward. The bandwidth accorded each SATA drive is plenty fast for 99% of your needs. Are you editing DV or SD or HD video? Then you should have scratch discs for that content so that if there's a drive crash, it doesn't bring your whole system down.

General performance gains would be negligible against the risk you are subjecting yourself to. But, since your machine is new, why don't you try it out for yourself and see if the gains are worth it to you... if they are perceptible. Just back up your precious data regularly.

chris v · Jan 22, 2005, 10:38 PM

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Here's a nice page on RAID technology:
http://english.aopen.com.tw/tech/techinside/RAID.htm

RAID 0 writes half to one drive and half to the other, so that if there's a failure with one drive both drives are rendered worthless.

That's what I figured he was on about. I'm a backup fanatic, so if I were to RAID anything, it'd be RAID 1, anyway. I was merely posing the rhetorical question out of general curiosity. I've been bitten ONCE by a hard drive failure. Lost a month's worth of work, back in about '97. Never again-- I keep 2 drives in all my machines and have scripts that auto-backup weekly.

For me, the SATA drive in my G5 tower is plenty fast enough. When I ran Logic on my Dual 1.0 G4, I had to stream aiff files from one drive, and bounce mixes to another. Now with the SATA, I can read 20 tracks of audio and write a stereo mix back to the same drive. There's not even a progress bar with a 50 MB Photoshop file on this thing-- the watch spins maybe twice, and it's opened/saved.

dennis cheung · Jan 23, 2005, 10:10 AM

The argument about raid 0 being bad is void because he was not asking about redunancy and was planning on getting a faster one (1). In either case whether he raid 0's two raptors OR buys (1) super duper fast sata drive, he is at the same risk level (ie: 1 hd failing would cause problems).

If he wanted redudancy, which wasn't the question, he would want to use raid 1 or 5. Nothing but raid 1 or 5 would save him anyways in a hardware failure.

As far as drive speeds go, nothing beats the raid 0 raptor drives for price/performance. Use your other hd for storage.

UnixMac · Jan 23, 2005, 01:23 PM

Forget about Raid 0 (for now) and pick up a Raptor (price depends on 36GB or 74GB - recommended for G5).... Keep the drive Apple shipped you (a Maxtor likely) as your data drive, and you can separate your apps/OSX from your data, itunes, and iphoto library and realize a significant speed boost due to the design of SATA.

My boot time is about 1/3 shorter than it was with my 250GB Maxtor as the #1 drive, and my launch time for photoshop while opening a photo file off the second drive is 1/2 the time.

Raid is a great idea, but I would do that an an external FW800 option and not with internals.

OreoCookie · Jan 24, 2005, 10:31 AM

Well, fastest was answered, but I think you should rather as for the most useful hd.

dj247046 · Jan 24, 2005, 10:51 AM

I case anyone wants to know. When you do a fresh install of OS 10.3 you can open disk utility (from a drop down menu on top) and make two sata disks a raid O or raid 1. Then select your new raid set as the install location. I have mine setup with two Seagate 160gb drives on raid 0. I know its not a "safe" configuration, but its my personal machine and any data loss would be minimal. (The speed increase is also nice)

-Dave

UnixMac · 12:27 PM

Originally posted by awcopus:

Barefeats tested this drive against the 10,000RPM sub-100GB Raptor and concluded that the Maxtor simply is better as a boot disk.

I read that test before I got my WD, and I didn't come out of it with that conclusion. I would also add that by having a 300GB Boot drive, it's implied that you're going to place a lot of Data on that drive, otherwise it's a waste of space, Since there isn't anywhere close to 300GB worth of apps of the Mac, and that in and of itself is a performance degredation.

Read:

http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/wd_raptor/
(read the last paragraph about the dream machine)
and:

http://storagereview.com/articles/20...WD740GD_1.html

and:

http://www.macgurus.com/guides/storageaccelguide.php

MacGuru's calls the Raptor the fastest SATA hard drive on the market

Waragainstsleep · Jan 24, 2005, 11:40 AM

Scanning this thread quickly, I didn't notice any mention of budgetary constraints. No-one has mentioned SCSI. SCSI has always been fastest, but it costs of course.

Appleman · Jan 24, 2005, 11:42 AM

Originally posted by UnixMac:
MacGuru's calls the Raptor the fastest SATA hard drive on the market

Nice link indeed! Thanks.

UnixMac · Jan 24, 2005, 11:33 PM

Originally posted by Waragainstsleep:
Scanning this thread quickly, I didn't notice any mention of budgetary constraints. No-one has mentioned SCSI. SCSI has always been fastest, but it costs of course.

Can the G5 do SCSI?

macaddict0001 · Jan 25, 2005, 12:10 AM

scsi can be done but it has to be through a pci scsi card.

Appleman · Jan 25, 2005, 08:03 AM

Originally posted by macaddict0001:
scsi can be done but it has to be through a pci scsi card.

How does it work? You have to go through giving numbers etc? I never really used it intensively i.e. more than 2 SCSI, but always have been reading that it was cumbersome and often you had to figure out which one to number 1, which 2, etc.
That was when they came with FireWire and said it didn't have any of these disadvantages.

What would be the added cost of using a SCSI harddisk plus PCI SCSI card in comparison to SATA?
And what would be the speed advantage? (I mean, how much faster is a SCSI harddisk is compared with todays fastest SATA disk?

OreoCookie · Jan 25, 2005, 11:23 AM

Originally posted by Appleman:
How does it work? You have to go through giving numbers etc? I never really used it intensively i.e. more than 2 SCSI, but always have been reading that it was cumbersome and often you had to figure out which one to number 1, which 2, etc.
That was when they came with FireWire and said it didn't have any of these disadvantages.

What would be the added cost of using a SCSI harddisk plus PCI SCSI card in comparison to SATA?
And what would be the speed advantage? (I mean, how much faster is a SCSI harddisk is compared with todays fastest SATA disk?

Only 15k rpm SCSI drives are usually faster. The Raptors are built like SCSI drives, they have the same 5-year warranty and there is no difference between a 10k SATA drive and a 10k SCSI drive -- at least not more of a difference than when comparing 10k SCSI drives from different vendors.

Personally, I don't think SCSI is useful for you in your situation. Example? I heard that only with a Raptor or a SCSI drive, you can have a whole orchestra in professional music software playing simultaneously. But if you are doing Jazz, you won't care (a friend of mine, a professional Jazz musician, still works on his PowerBook G4 400 for his compositions, as Jazz doesn't require tons of instruments).

I see many geeks in the PC world who brag with their top-of-the-line PCs, not noticing that I get their performance for probably half price in a year. If you don't specifically need a faster hd, I'd rather go for more storage, and those 250/300 gig drives are plenty fast.

UnixMac · Jan 25, 2005, 11:24 AM

Barefeats says this, but if you really ant SCSI, you're probably looking at $88 for a good card and anywhere from $171 for a 10000 36.7GB Cheetah to $657.00 for a 73.4GB 15,000 Cheetah.... the later will be faster than the 10000 Raptor SATA setup, but the former probably wont.

If money is no object, then do the SCSI with Raid as an external solution, and a Raptor SATA as the boot disk. And sell your Apple provided Maxtor on ebay.

OreoCookie · Jan 25, 2005, 11:33 AM

Originally posted by UnixMac:
Barefeats says this, but if you really ant SCSI, you're probably looking at $88 for a good card and anywhere from $171 for a 10000 36.7GB Cheetah to $657.00 for a 73.4GB 15,000 Cheetah.... the later will be faster than the 10000 Raptor SATA setup, but the former probably wont.

If money is no object, then do the SCSI with Raid as an external solution, and a Raptor SATA as the boot disk. And sell your Apple provided Maxtor on ebay.

But then he'll end up with less storage. Even many high-end servers ship with 10k drives, and as you mentioned, the Raptor will be in the same performance ballpark as a 10k SCSI drive.

But I'm not sure that he even needs a Raptor.

awcopus · Jan 25, 2005, 11:50 AM

Originally posted by UnixMac:
I read that test before I got my WD, and I didn't come out of it with that conclusion. I would also add that by having a 300GB Boot drive, it's implied that you're going to place a lot of Data on that drive, otherwise it's a waste of space, Since there isn't anywhere close to 300GB worth of apps of the Mac, and that in and of itself is a performance degredation.

Read:

http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/wd_raptor/
(read the last paragraph about the dream machine)
and:

http://storagereview.com/articles/20...WD740GD_1.html

and:

http://www.macgurus.com/guides/storageaccelguide.php

MacGuru's calls the Raptor the fastest SATA hard drive on the market

Thank you for the links. Good reads.

Here's my stance. I don't think that having a 210 GB of data on my boot HD is that big of a deal in terms of its impact on performance. This data includes more and more pictures in iPhoto and music in iTunes, and some downloaded movie files (quicktime trailers), and my own documents plus FCP sequence files (bigger than you'd think). All of my A/V editing is on dedicated scratch discs. In other words, I am using my computer, leading a digital lifestyle, and benefiting from having 300 GB of space for my home folder's burgeoning content. I back up onto DVDs fairly frequently, but I like having my stuff online and accessible.

If somebody is interested in outfitting their computer as if it were a hot rod, yes, having much of any significant data on an HD beyond a minimal installation of OS X is going to cause some drag. But, really, with two 2.5GHz processors, 6 GB of RAM, an X800 on the way, and 7200 RPM SATA drives on the main bus and via Sonnet's 4+4 card.... my system isn't bottlenecking significantly anywhere. If I were editing HD, I'd have to move to fiber and the XRAID, but for DV and even most SD (in uncomplicated sequences), I'm happy with the tempo of my computing experience and I guess I wonder what, at the margin, people are looking for in terms of performance improvements. I think we're talking about milliseconds and maybe a full blown hand full of seconds here and there. But there's a point at which you've got to put the stopwatch back in the drawer and use your computer instead of testing it. And using it means, yes, you're going to load up your drives with data even though that degrades performance *negligibly*. And then, all of a sudden, you've spent all of this money on a high performance drive a third or a fourth of the size of a drive that isn't actually 33% slower.

But since this thread is about pure performance tweaking, please excuse me if my input is largely irrelevant to posters here. And good luck to you Appleman in fulfilling your need, your need for speed.

macaddict0001 · Jan 25, 2005, 06:42 PM

Originally posted by Appleman:
How does it work? You have to go through giving numbers etc? I never really used it intensively i.e. more than 2 SCSI, but always have been reading that it was cumbersome and often you had to figure out which one to number 1, which 2, etc.
That was when they came with FireWire and said it didn't have any of these disadvantages.

What would be the added cost of using a SCSI harddisk plus PCI SCSI card in comparison to SATA?
And what would be the speed advantage? (I mean, how much faster is a SCSI harddisk is compared with todays fastest SATA disk?

really the only thing scsi offers over sata right now is the ability to daisy chain drives. It is not really any faster unless you get wicked fast drives and even then not by much. Sata is where you probably want to be.

Appleman · Jan 26, 2005, 06:04 AM

Originally posted by macaddict0001:
really the only thing scsi offers over sata right now is the ability to daisy chain drives. It is not really any faster unless you get wicked fast drives and even then not by much. Sata is where you probably want to be.

Hm, that is what I thought as well.

badtz · Jan 27, 2005, 04:48 PM

For music production:

would it be best to put the OS/Applications on one drive, and the scratch disk on another drive?

Or should the application/scratch be on the same drive? and the OS alone on it's own disk?

awcopus · Jan 27, 2005, 07:20 PM

Originally posted by badtz:
For music production:

would it be best to put the OS/Applications on one drive, and the scratch disk on another drive?

Or should the application/scratch be on the same drive? and the OS alone on it's own disk?

OS and apps on one drive, audio assets that you are editing on a different drive, and the working file for your mixing should be saved on your OS drive and backed up regularly.

UnixMac · Jan 29, 2005, 11:43 AM

Originally posted by awcopus:
But, really, with two 2.5GHz processors, 6 GB of RAM, an X800 on the way, and 7200 RPM SATA drives on the main bus and via Sonnet's 4+4 card.... my system isn't bottlenecking significantly anywhere.

Basically I agree with all what you say, in terms of value there is hardly a noticable improvement on over all system speed from all that I've gathered for most of time one would spend infront of their computer

The difference is that the bandwidth bottle neck on your and my system is the HD bus, namely the SATA, which is limited to 150mbs, sound like a lot but most drives hardly disk out more than 40-50.. when you can get 70+ and add to that a second drive dishing out files at 50+, now you're at some 130mbs data transfer rate. You have just reduced that bottle neck significantly. Even if it is for smaller files such as NEF (RAW), or .JPG files, and Excel spread sheets, etc... The point being that when I used to open a large Excel spread sheet with my one Maxtor, it took about 3-4 seconds, now it takes 1-2... Large NEF file would have taken 4-5 seconds, now 2... etc..

Hardly a major deal when you consider seconds are just that, fleeting seconds... but for overall speed.. it's the best solution short of external RAID or SCSI or both!

On a side note, if I had a choice between a raptor or an additional 1GB of RAM, and my system only had 1GB or less, I'd do the RAM first, then the Raptor.

OreoCookie · Jan 29, 2005, 12:09 PM

Originally posted by UnixMac:
Basically I agree with all what you say, in terms of value there is hardly a noticable improvement on over all system speed from all that I've gathered for most of time one would spend infront of their computer

The difference is that the bandwidth bottle neck on your and my system is the HD bus, namely the SATA, which is limited to 150mbs, sound like a lot but most drives hardly disk out more than 40-50.. when you can get 70+ and add to that a second drive dishing out files at 50+, now you're at some 130mbs data transfer rate. You have just reduced that bottle neck significantly. Even if it is for smaller files such as NEF (RAW), or .JPG files, and Excel spread sheets, etc... The point being that when I used to open a large Excel spread sheet with my one Maxtor, it took about 3-4 seconds, now it takes 1-2... Large NEF file would have taken 4-5 seconds, now 2... etc..

...

With SATA, harddisks don't have to share bandwidth, each disk gets the full 150 MBit/s. With PATA, in the worst case, two drives had to share the bandwidth.

badtz · Jan 29, 2005, 05:19 PM

Originally posted by awcopus:
OS and apps on one drive, audio assets that you are editing on a different drive, and the working file for your mixing should be saved on your OS drive and backed up regularly.

would it be better to have the working audio files and the scratch audio disk on the same drive? if not, why not?

thanks

Jonathan-Tanya · Jan 29, 2005, 05:33 PM

I would like more tests to be done about SCSI...and I don't think barefeets really addresses the issue.

Which is this, even in the world of superfast CPU's...servicing the hard drive can bring my whole system to a near halt (bearing in mind this is a Pentium IV 1.6)...but still....the old thing about SCSI is the host CPU doesn't really have to do much work, as the processor on the SCSI card itself is doing some of the meanial tasks of servicing the hard drive.

Of course, this advantage is less relevant nowadays...but not relevant at all?

I somehow doubt that. Also SCSI has a 320mb/s bandwidth, not 150 like SATA.

I disagree about the 15k 72gb scsi disks...those aren't worth the premium, because the disks are sparsely populated (meaning you get less data per rotation) somewhat defeating the purpose of the higher rotation speed.

I also disagree with your price estimates...yes, I guess they are ok enough for new drives, but I usually go with the e-bay drives, and I got my 146gb SCSI 10,000rpm drive for about $200.

I think that is the sweet spot. I have a powermac G5 1.6, its definately got an underpowered CPU, and if SCSI helps at all...that will be welcome.

I do oracle 10g database work with big datawarehouses, usually in the 300gb range, and copying it over and testing a development instance, is a common task....

well, the scsi drives are in the B2000 hp/ux workstation now...but eventually I'm going to stick them in the Mac....maybe then I can talk about real world numbers....still just theory now....but barefeats never talks about CPU utilization...maybe on Mac's its not a big deal...but its been a big deal on HP/UX and Windows...

OreoCookie · Jan 30, 2005, 06:58 AM

Originally posted by Jonathan-Tanya:
I would like more tests to be done about SCSI...and I don't think barefeets really addresses the issue.

Which is this, even in the world of superfast CPU's...servicing the hard drive can bring my whole system to a near halt (bearing in mind this is a Pentium IV 1.6)...but still....the old thing about SCSI is the host CPU doesn't really have to do much work, as the processor on the SCSI card itself is doing some of the meanial tasks of servicing the hard drive.

Of course, this advantage is less relevant nowadays...but not relevant at all?

I somehow doubt that. Also SCSI has a 320mb/s bandwidth, not 150 like SATA.

I disagree about the 15k 72gb scsi disks...those aren't worth the premium, because the disks are sparsely populated (meaning you get less data per rotation) somewhat defeating the purpose of the higher rotation speed.

I also disagree with your price estimates...yes, I guess they are ok enough for new drives, but I usually go with the e-bay drives, and I got my 146gb SCSI 10,000rpm drive for about $200.

I think that is the sweet spot. I have a powermac G5 1.6, its definately got an underpowered CPU, and if SCSI helps at all...that will be welcome.

I do oracle 10g database work with big datawarehouses, usually in the 300gb range, and copying it over and testing a development instance, is a common task....

well, the scsi drives are in the B2000 hp/ux workstation now...but eventually I'm going to stick them in the Mac....maybe then I can talk about real world numbers....still just theory now....but barefeats never talks about CPU utilization...maybe on Mac's its not a big deal...but its been a big deal on HP/UX and Windows...

Most of your points are out-dated. The Raptor spec's and warranty is that of SCSI drives (5 years). Also, the SCSI bandwidth has to be shared by several drives, so 320 MBit is not as great as it initially sounds (connect four hds and they have less bandwidth than 4 drives connected to a SATA adapter). New SATA drives can do numerous things that previously only SCSI drives could: tagged command queuing (reordering of read and write commands as to minimize the path) and hot-plugging.

Also, since DMA was introduced, the data is directly written to the memory. Also, CPU utilization is not an issue anymore, there is no noticeable impact on performance anymore.

Because of those reasons, SCSI is usually not worth the premium anymore for about 95 % of the users.

(BTW, also SCSI drives can fail, I've had several (older) SCSI hds fail in servers and cluster nodes at university.)

Cadaver · Jan 30, 2005, 09:50 AM

As far as SATA drives go, I've got both a 74GB 10,000 RPM Raptor and a Maxtor 7200 RPM 16MB cache 300GB drive in my G5, and I don't notice any real-world speed difference.

Here's an interesting link (might have been linked in a previous post, but what the heck): http://www.barefeats.com/boot02.html

Links to a G5 boot drive speed comparison. Nicely done, I think.

Cadaver · Jan 30, 2005, 09:56 AM

Originally posted by Thinine:
You can boot from the software RAID in OS X.

Only on G5s (and Xserves). I don't think you can boot from OS X's software RAIDs on G4 machines. (Tooki?)

action · Feb 1, 2005, 05:47 PM

hello,

i created a raid 0 set with my oem 250gb maxtor drives i orgianlly bto'd from apple and installed my os on the set.

as far as seeing any speed increasing, i would say is negligble. it might be a tad faster in opening apps etc... but definitely not an overwhelming sensation.

i was going to create a raptor raid set for my boot disk for the ultimate in speed but i think i will be better served to make any raid set a scratched disk for fcp hd.

i will try it both ways and see if there really is any benefit to creating a raid 0 set from raptor disks. if anyone has created raid 0 sets from raptors i would really like your input.

awcopus · Feb 1, 2005, 06:14 PM

Originally posted by badtz:
would it be better to have the working audio files and the scratch audio disk on the same drive? if not, why not?

thanks

This is not a performance issue, because there's no difference in performance between the above setups.

Look at it this way. Your scratch disc is the one getting the workout, so it's the one most likely to fail. If you have your FCP project file (or Reason or Logic or whatever file) on that drive, how the hell do you reconstitute your project whent that drive craps out? You can't, unless you've backed it up elsewhere, which you should do no matter what... but what if you've forgotten to save and backup the last 2 hours of work when the drive fails? Now, in addition to installing a new drive, you're going to be 2 hours behind once you reconnect your media files.

That's the rationale. Hope this helps.

Appleman · Feb 1, 2005, 06:18 PM

Originally posted by awcopus:
but what if you've forgotten to save and backup the last 2 hours of work when the drive fails? Now, in addition to installing a new drive, you're going to be 2 hours behind once you reconnect your media files.

Isn't this where RAID comes in: presuming you use 2 harddisks which have exactly the same data, so if one disk fails you have it on the other disk?
I understand this is not what the thread was meant for, which was about speed, but after all, as you said, two hours of work plus getting (and waiting for) a new harddisk plus installing that disk, isn't a matter of seconds neither.

chris v · Feb 2, 2005, 12:21 AM

Originally posted by Appleman:
Isn't this where RAID comes in: presuming you use 2 harddisks which have exactly the same data, so if one disk fails you have it on the other disk?
I understand this is not what the thread was meant for, which was about speed, but after all, as you said, two hours of work plus getting (and waiting for) a new harddisk plus installing that disk, isn't a matter of seconds neither.

RAID 1 yes, but it won't improve speed. It's an either/or until you get to 4 disks (RAID 0+1)

Appleman · Feb 2, 2005, 04:13 AM

Originally posted by Appleman:
I understand this is not what the thread was meant for, which was about speed

Originally posted by chris v:
RAID 1 yes, but it won't improve speed. It's an either/or until you get to 4 disks (RAID 0+1)

chris v · Feb 2, 2005, 10:34 AM

Originally posted by Appleman:

Posted above: This guy explains it so I don't have to! Actually, trying to draw a chart with ascii characters crossed my mind, but...

http://english.aopen.com.tw/tech/techinside/RAID.htm

2 drives can be striped for either redundancy or speed. 4 drives can be striped for both. 2 for speed, x 2 more for redundancy.

Appleman · Feb 2, 2005, 03:11 PM

Chris v, I know this. But as I said, the thread was about speeding up things ("Fastest harddisk for PowerMac G5") so that's why I stated that this RAID can be used for security, but since the thread was about speed, that was more or less off topic.
Nevermind.

I just installed the WD74 Raptor 10,000rpm.
Now only the 8GB RAM is missing

chris v · Feb 2, 2005, 03:22 PM

Originally posted by Appleman:
Chris v, I know this. But as I said, the thread was about speeding up things ("Fastest harddisk for PowerMac G5") so that's why I stated that this RAID can be used for security, but since the thread was about speed, that was more or less off topic.
Nevermind.

I just installed the WD74 Raptor 10,000rpm.
Now only the 8GB RAM is missing

Cool. Now, get three more and one of those nifty internal hard-drive adaptors, and make a RAID 0+1 out of 10,000 RPM Raptors. :drool:

I'm chiseling away at that RAM "problem" 1 gig at a time-- might have mine up to 3.5 gig by this summer...

action · Feb 3, 2005, 12:27 AM

stripping my boot disc in a raid 0 gave me very little real world performance boost.

i stripped 2 250gb oem maxtors. however, what did give me a the boost i was expecting was defragging the raid set with techtool pro 4. is a little surprised at the performance boost with the defrag. opening applications is as fast as it's everybeen and in general anything hard disc intensive was a noticeble difference.

just some non scientific observations.

i'm still waiting on 2 74 gb raptors that i will stripe and install as a boot disc.

chung lee

Appleman · Feb 3, 2005, 03:18 AM

Originally posted by chris v:
I'm chiseling away at that RAM "problem" 1 gig at a time

That's exactly what I don't like to do, although it's tempting to put in modules of 512 in pairs, but then you are ending up with 4GB max.
However, since you have the ability to put in 8GB of RAM, one day you'll might need it. So I decided to leave the lousy 512MB in, and start expanding with 1GB modules, until there is plenty to trash the 256MB modules, which by then probably will sale for aproximately US$10,- anyway.

Cadaver · Feb 3, 2005, 10:07 AM

I've got a Maxtor 300GB drive w/ 16MB cache (currently set as the boot drive), and after two weeks of heavy use, I can discern virtually no speed difference between it and the Raptor 74GB I had been using. The high-density platters and 16MB of cache really boost things to the point where it can keep up with the Raptor.

And not being confined to 69.5GB really helps.

The Raptor is now my scratch drive. I may at some point experiment with putting the VM volume on it instead of the boot drive.